Brandon the Game Devhttp://brandonthegamedev.com
Mon, 21 May 2018 13:00:23 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.6http://brandonthegamedev.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-Web-Favicon-1-32x32.jpgBrandon the Game Devhttp://brandonthegamedev.com
3232Passion isn’t a Pitch and 5 Other Ways to Misunderstand Board Game Kickstarter as a Marketplacehttp://brandonthegamedev.com/passion-isnt-a-pitch-and-5-other-ways-to-misunderstand-board-game-kickstarter-as-a-marketplace/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/passion-isnt-a-pitch-and-5-other-ways-to-misunderstand-board-game-kickstarter-as-a-marketplace/#respondMon, 21 May 2018 13:00:23 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2374I’ve made my fair share of mistakes while building this business. I don’t sweep them under the rug. In fact, I even pulled apart the broken bits of my failed Kickstarter campaign for my understanding and published them online for public benefit. Being able to analyze and move forward after failure is critical to your success and a big part of getting your game from Start to Finish. This is part two of four in the Failure Recovery series.

Today, I’m going to be covering six really common ways board game Kickstarter campaigns fall apart. This is based primarily on my observation of Kickstarter as a market in 2018, not necessarily how it was in the past. The market is shifting and maturing, moving inexorably toward large companies with established intellectual properties. That’s not a bad thing – it brings more people into the hobby board game world we enjoy! It definitely changes how you have to approach the business, though.

Mistake 1: Emphasizing passion instead of the game.

Kickstarter started in 2009 as a way for people to fund their passion projects. That may not have been the intention of the company from the get-go, but that’s how the site was interpreted by the general public. For a long time, emphasizing your passion for the project while simultaneously pitching it was a reliable way to appear human and receive funding.

I’m not so sure about that anymore. Don’t get me wrong: passion is a beautiful thing. Passion will see you through difficult times, make you more charismatic, and give you a compelling story that people can rally behind. However: passion isn’t a pitch.

When you make a board game today, you’re on the same platform as CMON and other very high-profile publishers who can reliably pull more than one million dollars per campaign. These companies are very rarely mom-and-pop shops like old-school Kickstarter. They make a lot of money because their products are carefully crafted for the audience, their pitches are extremely strong, and the games are good.

Your game’s fit for the market is more important than your passion. So many indie creators, myself included, emphasize passion to the detriment of the product itself. Passion needs to be at the root of your product. It’s not a selling point.

Mistake 2: The game lacks a hook.

Because Kickstarter is so crowded these days, you need to catch each backer’s attention in a few seconds. The only way your game can survive in this environment is to be a good game and a good product. Good games have clever themes and mechanics. Good products are made for audiences using hard data to figure out what people like. If people like sci-fi and fantasy, you give them sci-fi and fantasy. If people like worker placement, you give them worker placement.

That’s only the beginning of making a good product, though. Even something as ideal for Kickstarter as a $20 fantasy worker placement small box game needs something to catch people’s eyes. It could be great components, a unique rule, or really special art. Your hook can be lots of different things, but it needs to be both tested with your intended audience and strong enough for people to identify your game as “the one with…”

But seriously: you need to pay attention to people’s purchasing patterns. A poor price point doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making your game too expensive. You can make games with an awkward price point that people aren’t buying at the moment. At the time that I am writing this, the campaigns I’ve seen succeed the most are expensive games or light games that are at or under $25. Much of what is in the middle is struggling.

Kickstarter is a giant open data set. Use hard data to figure out what price point core rewards are going for on successful campaigns. Try to match that price point.

Mistake 4: Poor components.

Lackluster components won’t necessarily sink a board game Kickstarter, but they won’t do it any favors. Having custom meeples, miniatures, or something creative and eye-catching helps a lot. In a lot of ways, it functions as a hook.

For better or worse, board gamers sometimes equate components with value. Do some research on Facebook or Board Game Geek to see what components gamers find valuable. You’d be surprised how often manufacturing price and perceived value don’t match up. I did one poll where wooden cubes scored higher than cards on value, despite cards costing three times as much to print and requiring extensive art creation.

Mistake 5: Poor art.

You have a few seconds to catch people’s attention. Art needs to not just be good in traditional artistic terms, but also good for product design. While there are a number of ways you can ensure your art is well-made from a tactical and technical standpoint, the most important thing to remember here is: test your art with your audience.

It’s impossible to know what art will resonate with people without running it by an audience. If you have a Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram account, try using those sites to see what people think of your art. If your art receives far higher engagement than your typical posts, that’s a very good sign. Every single art piece should ignite passion and interest in others. Otherwise, you could run into a situation where your game isn’t eye-catching enough to stand out in a crowded market.

Mistake 6: No reviews.

Last but not least, there are still some Kickstarters out there that go live without reviews. I don’t believe reviewers are the gatekeepers that they used to be, but it’s still a gigantic red flag when a campaign has no reviews. (Product-market fit, I believe, is more relevant than reviews, but I spent basically five points on that already.) You need social proof and reviewers act as testimonials to the quality of your product.

You need to print a few copies of your game from a print-on-demand supplier to send to reviewers. Thankfully, it’s easier than it’s ever been to get started with the actual printing process. For that matter, you can reach out to the majority of small reviewers by Twitter DM. The cost is relatively low compared to the rest of your project and the consequences of not having any reviews are too severe.

Board game Kickstarters can be complicated to run. Hopefully by spelling these common pitfalls, you can avoid them and fund successfully. Recognizing pitfalls is a great way to avoid failure.

If you have any additions to what you see above, please let me know in the comments

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/passion-isnt-a-pitch-and-5-other-ways-to-misunderstand-board-game-kickstarter-as-a-marketplace/feed/0How to Diagnose Failure & Move Forward as a Board Game Developerhttp://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-diagnose-failure-move-forward-as-a-board-game-developer/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-diagnose-failure-move-forward-as-a-board-game-developer/#respondMon, 14 May 2018 13:00:12 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2372This is part one of four in the Failure Recovery series in Start to Finish: Publish and Sell Your First Board Game. I didn’t intend to create a series on failure recovery when I created Start to Finish, but after the failure of my Highways & Byways Kickstarter campaign in April, I believe it to be necessary. Let’s be real: life doesn’t go from point A to point B like you think it will. Understanding that and moving forward are critical to your success.

When you take on big, risky creative endeavors – whether as a hobbyist or an entrepreneur – you take on a lot of risks. You will find yourself out of your comfort zone, over your head, and unable to satisfy every demand. This can be tremendous for your personal growth because it pushes you well past limits that you thought were unbreakable. It also exposes you to the risk – nay, inevitability – of eventual failure.

Not all failure comes in the form of unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns. Failure can involve missed deadlines, lost clients, scrapped prototypes, controversial public statements, or no-show events. How you handle these failures will determine whether you will grow as a person and whether your business will survive in the long-run.

Whenever you fail at something big, you need to ask “why?” When you get an answer, ask “why” again. Repeat this until you finally reach a satisfying answer. This is called root cause analysis. I’ll show you how this works in a moment by showing you the same method I used to diagnose my own failed Kickstarter campaign.

Categorizing Failure

So that we can have a productive discussion below, let’s define the major types of failure first. There are strategical, operational, and tactical failures.

Strategic failures represent a failure in a major part of your plan. With games, this involves the nature of the project itself. It is often hard or impossible to fix these without starting fresh.

Operational failures come from a problem in your plan’s implementation, but not necessarily the core concepts of your plan. This often includes major problems in your marketing, a badly thought-out pitch, or an insufficiently engaged audience.

Tactical failures come from minor breakdowns that can have outsized impacts. This can include things like your mailing list having a dead link and costing you precious first-hour pledges on Kickstarter.

I won’t bring these up again later in the article. Still, this is a useful framework I want you to keep in mind for when you start planning to recover from failure. Operational and tactical failures can be fixed. Major strategic failures can sometimes be fixed, but often it’s better to move on.

Defining Your Process

With a basic understanding of the types of failure out of the way, now you are free to start looking at the process you followed. It helps to sketch out the process of whatever it is you’re trying to do. We’ll use the game development process – from start to finish – as an example.

Creating a board game for Kickstarter is a process which involves the following sub-processes:

Concept Design: The creation of initial ideas based on what hobby board gamers are currently interested in. This involves outlining a new game’s requirements and preparing a tentative pitch for the next step.

Market Validation: Using online communities to gauge general audience interest. After the initial idea is validated, specific concepts are run by the audience to gauge audience interest. If the audience shows passion and interest, continue to game design. Otherwise, the concept is refined or scrapped entirely.

Game Design: The process of taking a game’s specifications and turning them into a functional game with mechanics, rules, and components.

Play-Testing: Playing the game and refining it until it’s fun. If a game fails to pass play-testing, it is pushed back to the game design stage.

Artwork: After a game is play-tested, artwork is commissioned. This involves hiring a freelance artist and providing them with detailed specifications on what to create.

Artwork Validation: Market validation specifically for artwork.

Sampling & Prototyping: Testing games for physical usability and printing copies for reviewers.

Promotional Marketing: In order to launch a successful Kickstarter campaign, each game must be promoted far in advance of the beginning of the campaign. This involves lead generation with the intention of converting leads as part of the Kickstarter campaign. (For me, the primary forms of lead generation include giveaway prizes and various Pangea Games online communities such as the Discord server, Facebook group, and other social media outlets.)

Outreach: This is separate from lead generation and encompasses reviews, blogs, podcasts, live streams, press releases, and retailer outreach.

Audience Validation: Checking the game one last time to see if people like how it turned out.

Campaigning: Responsibilities include publicizing the launch, drumming up attention for the launch, sending out launch day communications, managing the community, writing updates, and editing the campaign page as necessary.

Manufacturing: This involves the physical creation of large print runs of board games, usually 500 units or more. Related process include the submission of request-for-quotes, creating and validating specifications, selecting a printer, and following up with the printer.

Warehousing & Fulfillment: This involves the physical storage and fulfillment of the inventory after it is manufactured. Inventory is sent from the manufacturer to one or more warehouses where it is fulfilled and the excess is stored.

Online Sales: This involves the sale of any games in excess of what was sold after the campaign.

Working Backward with Your Process to Diagnose Failure

That’s a very long process, but as you can see, detailing it in this way makes it much easier to pinpoint where the breakdown is. Once you have your process mapped out in sequence, I recommend working backward to diagnose the failure. The later a breakdown comes in your overall process, the easier it is – generally speaking – to fix. For example, if your Kickstarter campaign fails to fund, the breakdown is in “Campaigning” but the roots might be deeper. Moving backwards, analyze each step.

Campaigning: Were there problems spreading the word? Did launch day communications breakdown? Was there a disaster in managing the community? Was the page itself unclear and unfocused?

Audience Validation: Was the audience size overall sufficient to support a campaign? Was there genuine passion and engagement?

Outreach: Did you spread the word through a variety of media including blogs, podcasts, live-streams, and press releases?

Promotional Marketing: Did you have a systematic way to bring in and process leads? Did you have a working sales funnel? Were you collecting email addresses?

Sampling & Prototyping: Were the review copies of sufficient quality to attract reviewers? Did you have enough copies to send for review? Were there physical issues that made the game difficult to play?

Artwork: Was the artwork complete and pleasing to your audience?

Play-Testing & Game Design: Was the game enjoyable, complete, and well-designed?

Concept Design & Market Validation: Did the core concept of the game resonate with customers? Were people passionate about playing it based on description alone? Did it have a “hook”?

As a general rule, you want to focus on the lowest / farthest-back problems and work your way forward from there. If you weren’t collecting emails, didn’t do enough outreach, and your campaign page looked bad, but everything else was fine; then you have fairly superficial issues. If the core concept of the game wasn’t resonating with players – as was the case with the ill-fated Highways & Byways – your best option might be to scrap it entirely or do extensive rework.

By working backward to identify the factors that led up to failure, you can develop an implementation plan to fix them. The specifics will ultimately be determined by the mistake you made that led to your failure. Once you’ve got an implementation plan for fixing the failure, you can estimate how long it will take and how much money it will take. From there, you can decide whether or not to continue on the project. In the Kickstarter campaign example, your options are – broadly speaking – to relaunch, make a different game, pivot into a related field that doesn’t involve game design, or quit game development entirely. Knowing where you went wrong helps you choose what’s best for you.

Failure isn’t the end of the world. It can provide tremendous learning experiences that will pave the way for your future success. Accept your failure and try to learn from it. It might make you stronger.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing similar articles about failure recovery, including one about common causes of failure, saving face, and avoiding despair. In the mean time, thank you so much for reading. For those of you brave souls out there, I enourage you to share your own failures in the comment section so that we can all learn from them.

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-diagnose-failure-move-forward-as-a-board-game-developer/feed/0How to Get Big on Instagram as a Board Game Devhttp://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-get-big-on-instagram-as-a-board-game-dev/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-get-big-on-instagram-as-a-board-game-dev/#commentsMon, 07 May 2018 13:00:49 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2220I’ve talked about how board game developers can get big on Twitter and use Facebook to its fullest potential. Now it’s time to talk about the prettiest social network on the internet: Instagram. Many marketers pass over Instagram because it’s not as easy to understand as Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram is very particular about how you can use it. You can only post photos and you must use a mobile device. On top of that, it’s populated largely by young people who are resistant to advertising. For those reasons, many marketers don’t know how to approach Instagram. As it turns out, it’s not as hard as it looks.

I’ve broken this guide into five parts:

What is Instagram Good For?

Getting Started

Getting Noticed

Refining Your Approach

Using Instagram for More than Just Pictures

What is Instagram Good For?

Reasons to Use Instagram

As of 2017, Instagram had 800 million users. They skew heavily toward the age group 18-29, which makes it a decidedly younger audience than the one courted by its parent company, Facebook. This represents an enormous opportunity for board game developers like yourself. While an older audience may be more likely to back your Kickstarter campaign since they have more discretionary income, Instagram is really good for sewing the seeds for your future brand. In fact, this is my primary rationale for using the website: Instagram is really good for branding. I believe there is an intangible benefit to young people knowing who you are and what you’re all about.

If the potential to build a quality brand isn’t an attractive enough prospect on its own, perhaps this will win you over. It’s the easiest social media site when it comes to passively pulling people to your page. For better or worse, Facebook requires cash to bring in an audience. Twitter’s hashtag system is broken, so you have to actively reach out to get anywhere on there. With Instagram, if you can get your photos in the “Top Posts” for a given hashtag, people will follow you without you doing anything else. The Top Posts section places nine popular photos at the top that people will immediately see when they look up a hashtag such as #boardgame.

Because people on Instagram actually search for hashtags, if you can get an image into the Top 9 of a popular hashtag, your image can go viral. Instagram lets you add up to 30 hashtags on your images and it’s common to use 10-15 on each image. You get several chances to get into the Top 9. That means if you make it into the Top 9 on multiple popular hashtags, you can pull in a lot of people very quickly. Here is a good rule of thumb: post photos with a clear object in focus, contrasting colors, and lots of detail. Photos like that stop people from listlessly scrolling through their feeds, enticing them to click on your images.

That brings me to my penultimate point, and a very important one: Instagram is inexpensive to use. You don’t have to spend money on advertising like Facebook. You don’t have to spend lots of time on outreach like Twitter. Instagram is the last major social media network on which you can reliably break 1,000 followers within three months.

Lastly, Instagram has a much more global audience than any other social media site I’ve used. Twitter and Facebook are based on language, which tends to mean English speakers communicate with other English speakers almost exclusively. Instagram breaks down those barriers – you could end up getting fans in Los Angeles, Berlin, Tehran, Jakarta, Auckland, New York City, and Baghdad. Having a globally diverse audience can help you out if you decide to launch a campaign on Kickstarter. Global support may boost your visibility within Kickstarter’s search algorithm.

Reasons not to Use Instagram

For all the beautiful reasons to use Instagram, it has some really annoying qualities. It’s mobile-only, so you can’t easily use the full app on your desktop. You have to download the Windows app instead.

You can’t link directly to your site in the captions of your photos, making it really hard to have an effective call to action. The next best thing is to put a link in your bio and tell people to click your bio. Obviously, this is suboptimal. In addition to that, every single like, comment, and follow results in a notification on the app…and it caps you at seeing 100 at a time. There is no good reason why they can’t group likes and follows together for more meaningful notifications.

It also doesn’t help that the advertising system, despite being managed on Facebook’s website, doesn’t give you the same bang for your buck. I’ve tried a few experiments with advertising on Instagram and I’ve yet to have a campaign I’m satisfied with compared to its parent company. Facebook, on the other hand, can pull in potential customers with their extremely effective ad system.

Last but not least, for all the praise I’ve heaped on Instagram for being a place where you can still go viral, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Posting quality photos all the time can be difficult to maintain and I’ve had weeks where I haven’t had time to post decent photos. That can put you in the unenviable position of saying “do I post this mediocre photo and risk losing engagement?” or “do I post nothing and risk being forgotten?” I’ve yet to find the right answer to that.

Getting Started

Setting Up Your Account & Making it Look Good

Getting set up on Instagram is easier than most other social media websites. On the home page, enter your email or phone number, full name, username, and password. Click Sign Up and follow any further prompts. It is really that straightforward. My only caution is to be careful choosing a username because your username will become part of the URL people use to reach you. For example, my main Instagram account is http://instagram.com/brandongamedev.

Once you’re logged in, click Edit Profile. Upload a profile photo – I suggest one of your face since people respond more positively to faces than logos. Tweak your Name and Username to your satisfaction. Add a link to your website – remember, this is the only link you will have on Instagram. Then write a catchy and short bio like you would on Twitter. Click Submit.

If you need an example of a bio, here’s the one I use with @BrandonGameDev: “I’ll help you learn to make board games from scratch. I made War Co., and I’m making Highways & Byways. I own and run Pangea Games.”

As with Facebook and Twitter, before you do any serious outreach, you’ll want to post for two weeks first. Unlike with Facebook, you can’t backdate Instagram posts, so you’ll need to take a couple of weeks to post one picture per day to establish your account. You’ll want to have the right Content Mix to attract people to your account. On Instagram, I generally recommend that between 25-30% of your images be self-promotion and the others be sharing others’ work. No matter what, though, make your pictures gorgeous. Remember: clear object in focus, contrasting colors, lots of detail.

I have a little more advice about the images you post. Don’t go overboard with filters – usually, a slight bump in brightness, contrast, saturation, and/or structure can really bring out the pizzazz in your photo. I’ve also found the best results posting between 10 am and noon eastern time, but you should experiment with different times to see what works for your audience.

Getting Noticed

Methods of Gaining Followers

There are a number of techniques you can use to gain followers on Instagram. Some of them are legitimate methods I would recommend and others gain you followers in the worst way possible. I’m going to lay out all these methods and give you my opinions. The methods you choose to use to build your following are entirely up to you. I’m listing these methods from “cleanest” to “dirtiest.”

The most acceptable way to gain followers on Instagram, to nobody’s surprise, is to simply post great images. Facebook requires money and Twitter requires aggressive outreach. Instagram, however, rewards users for posting great images on the right hashtags. For example, let’s say you post a gorgeous photo of a game of Scythe in progress, and you tag it with the following: #boardgame #boardgames #tabletopgame #scythe #bgg #boardgamegeek. With a great photo and some luck, you could get into the Top Posts on those tags. If you do that, you’re likely to pick up a few followers every time you do it. You can even pick up followers if you don’t get in the Top Posts since hashtags are chronologically ordered.

Since Instagram is connected to Facebook, you can use advertising to gain followers too. I’ve yet to see hard data on how well this works. I’m not sure if there is a good return on your investment. It’s really hard to tell what an Instagram follower is worth. Yet advertising is a very, very clean method of gaining followers.

If you’re willing to put in some time, you can look up photos by hashtag, such as #boardgame, and start leaving comments on the photos. It’s time-consuming, but people are fairly likely to follow you if you leave comments. Do this enough times and you can slowly gain hundreds of followers. This is a pretty clean method of outreach, assuming you don’t automate it or lazily give the thumbs up emoji to every photo you see.

If you’re willing to do aggressive outreach, but you’re looking for something faster, you can always go down a popular hashtag and indiscriminately like every photo you see. This is a little dirty, but it’s fast and effective. If you do it too fast, Instagram might think you’re a bot and kick you off the site, though. Even if they don’t kick you off, it’s just a little…seedy. It’s engagement with engaging.

We all want to gain followers.

You can always follow people, leaving likes and comments on their photos to entice them into following you back. This can be shady if you don’t target your leads or if you try to follow the same people twice. If you very carefully create lists of people to follow, though, and you make sure to never follow anyone twice, this method can be acceptable. Still, you’re left with the mess of following a bunch of people and using some lousy free app on the App Store to unfollow people who don’t follow you back after a couple of weeks. Overall, this is a very fast and effective technique, it’s super common, and – if we’re being totally honest – is probably the nastiest acceptable behavior on social media.

If you want to get out of the moral gray area and go straight for the darkness, you can always use automation to mass like, mass comment, or mass follow. When you see one-word comments that don’t really apply to your photos on Instagram, that means somebody is leaving a generic mass comment on your photo. It’s basically the friendliest form of spam on the planet…but it is spam. There are very simple Python scripts that can auto-like, auto-comment, and auto-follow for you, but I strongly advise you don’t use them. It may gain a lot of followers, but your leads will probably be bad and the whole concept is deceptive.

Last but not least, you can always buy Instagram followers. This is shady and the vast majority of the followers you buy will be total crap. If you see someone who gains 20,000 followers in a day, that’s what happened. Check their profile two months later when all those followers are mysteriously gone.

You Must Experiment

As I discussed in How to Rise Above the Noise of the Internet & Get Noticed, when we use social media as business owners, we are at the mercy of the ever-changing algorithms that curate our experiences online. What works today may not work tomorrow. When I created @WarMachinesCo on Instagram, I was able to get nearly 34,000 followers at its peak because I could regularly get in the top 9 pictures for #scifi, which would bring in 50-60 new followers per day. Sometimes a picture would get massive amounts of likes, drawing in hundreds of people per day. If they had changed the way the top 9 pictures for any given hashtag were chosen, though, the account would go into a slow decline.

You always to keep an eye on what blows up on social media and what is ignored entirely. Pay attention to Instagram insights and challenge your assumptions. Never take anything for granted. Remember that your ultimate goal is to sell your game or other products/services, not to gain followers. Figure out what helps you achieve that goal.

Refining Your Approach

Automating Your Posts: Ongoing

You can upload your photos and write your captions to a scheduler such as Buffer. Then at a specific time of day, a time of your choice, you’ll get a push notification. You open the Buffer app, it saves the photo to your camera roll, copies the caption to your clipboard, and opens Instagram. You then add the photo and paste the caption.

Despite the annoyance, spending 30 seconds every day posting to Instagram that you had already prepared is a lot better than trying to cobble something together on the fly. Since Instagram is so visual, it’s really beneficial to prepare everything on your desktop or laptop computer, upload it to Buffer, and post a little throughout the week. It keeps your processes lean and your audience engaged.

Refining Your Account: Ongoing

Instagram, like Facebook, has a built-in analytics tool called Insights. Pay attention to which photos get the most likes and post more photos like them. Unlike Twitter where you need to factor in retweets, replies, and likes; Instagram is a lot simpler. Comments on Instagram tend to go hand-in-hand with likes, so if you focus on optimizing likes, that will help your pictures be seen by more people, get in the Top Posts of certain hashtags, and passively gain followers.

Using Instagram for More than Just Pictures

Videos and Stories

As a keen reader, you may have noticed that I’ve not yet mentioned Instagram’s ability to share video. Instagram allows users to share brief videos on their Instagram profiles, up to 60 seconds in length. These videos will stay there forever unless you take them down. You can also post Instagram stories up to 15 seconds in length – these are only shared with your followers and last up to 24 hours. Last but not least, you can do live videos that are up to 1 hour in length.

At the current time, it’s tough to tell how important videos will be to your overall Instagram strategy. I encourage you to experiment and see what works for you and your brand. I still recommend you post lots of pictures since those are likely to show up in the Top Posts of hashtags more easily than videos. That said, the three different video formats that Instagram allows you to use leave you with plenty of opportunities to engage your audience.

Market Research

Like with Twitter and Facebook, Instagram can allow you to keep a finger on the pulse of the board game industry as a whole. Twitter can be difficult to navigate and parse. Facebook contains lots of great information, often through Facebook groups. Instagram, however, has a working hashtag system that you can easily and visually search. Just pulling up the #boardgame hashtag and scrolling through the photos can tell you what’s popular.

Testing Artwork with an Audience

Instagram also provides you with a tremendous opportunity to test artwork. You can post two versions of your artwork at the same time on different days with the same hashtags and see which one gets the most likes. You can use the more popular one in your final product. It’s not a perfect method, but it can be a very insightful one.

Making Connections

As with any social media site, the real purpose is to talk to people. Be genuine, make friends, help others out. The connections you make that way will be far more rewarding than ones you make by aggressive lead generation.

Instagram can be a wonderful way for a board game developer to create a global community and establish their brand. It takes relatively little time to maintain and can passively bring in people you’d never be able to reach on Facebook or Instagram. While Facebook is a much better backbone for your marketing, Instagram is definitely a site you should learn to use.

How have your experiences on Instagram been? Feel free to share thoughts and questions below

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-get-big-on-instagram-as-a-board-game-dev/feed/6How to Build a Mailing List and Send Newsletters as a Board Game Devhttp://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-build-a-mailing-list-and-send-newsletters-as-a-board-game-dev/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-build-a-mailing-list-and-send-newsletters-as-a-board-game-dev/#respondMon, 30 Apr 2018 13:00:51 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2218I’m a big fan of mailing lists. Sending email newsletters to well-targeted mailing lists is one of the best ways you can spread the word of your business and keep customers engaged. I spoke about the value of mailing lists earlier in How to Generate Traffic for Your Board Game Kickstarter or Website, but today I want to dive into the details you need to know to get started. As such, this guide will be split into five parts:

Mailing List Basics

Setting up a Mailing List on MailChimp

Creating a Landing Page that Works

Creating a Template that Works

Building Your Mailing List

Mailing List Basics

Before you create a mailing list, you need to understand how they fit into your marketing strategy. I talk about this in How to Choose & Use a Board Game Marketing Strategy that Works, but I’ll recap the basics here. After people are paying attention and interested in your game or brand, you’ll need someplace for them to go before you ask them to take action. The best places I know to send interested potential customers is to an online community or a mailing list. In fact, I personally use both – providing access to an online community in exchange for an email address.

For you, emails are valuable to have because you can push marketing messages to customers. You can persuade people to read your posts, back your Kickstarter, or buy your game. For customers, this is an easy and passive way to stay in touch. Even better, if you’re putting thought and love into your emails, you can make their lives better by reading them. This is what I try to do – spend about 20-30 minutes every week crafting emails that people want to open.

Another thing you need to do before you create a mailing list is get a P.O. box. Yes, that sounds weird, but you need to hear me out on this. In order to be compliant with anti-spam laws, you need to have your business address at the bottom of every email you send out. This is a legal requirement. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in putting my home address – which is ██████████ – on the internet for strangers to find. That’s why you get a P.O. box. For folks based in the USA, that’s as simple as going to the post office and saying “I would like a P.O. box” and then paying them $60-or-so every six months.

Who would have guessed you needed a physical mailbox to send emails?

Once you set up your mailing list, you’ll become aware of a number of cryptic sounding metrics that will tell you about the health of your mailing list. Here are some you need to know:

Open Rate – the percentage of your mailing list that opens your email. (25% or higher is considered good.)

Click Rate – the percentage of your mailing list that clicks on at least one link in your email. (2% or higher is considered good.)

Hard Bounce – happens when you send to an invalid email address.

Soft Bounce – happens when your email is sent to a valid email address, but they don’t receive the email.

Subscribes – the number of people who join your mailing list.

Unsubscribes – the number of people who leave your mailing list. (Ideally, this is 1% or lower.)

By far, the most important metric is click rate. It indicates the number of people who are using your emails to get where you want them to go. If your click rate is low, that means you need to work on your call to action. We’ll talk more about calls to action in the template section below.

As with anything, I cannot give you the perfect answers on how to run the right email campaign for your business. All I can do is give you guidelines and examples. You need to go into this with the mindset of a scientist. Always be experimenting. Always be testing. Always be ready to change when the data says that’s the right thing to do.

Setting up a Mailing List on MailChimp

There are lots of sites that will help you set up a mailing list, but the one I use is MailChimp and I really like it. This is what I’ll be teaching you to use. Click that link and then click Sign Up Free. Provide an email, username, and password.

Once you’re logged in, create a list. At the time I’m writing this post, that means clicking Lists then clicking Create List button. You’ll be asked to enter the following:

List Name – I use Brandon the Game Dev Newsletter. Short and descriptive.

Default From Email Address – I set up one on my web server called no.reply@brandonthegamedev.com. This isn’t hard to do, but it’s out of the scope of this article.

Default From Name – I use Brandon Rollins. More personal that way.

Remind people how they signed up for your list – I use:

Thanks for signing up for my newsletter! You’ll very soon be receiving updates from Brandon the Game Dev.

Contact Information – I use my P.O. Box.

Enable double opt-in – I leave this unchecked. Otherwise, people have to respond to a confirmation email when they sign up, which lowers sign-up rates.

Notifications – I leave all of them unchecked. They get old fast.

Click Save. Then click Settings and click List fields and *|MERGE|* tags. Merge tags are really cool, so you’ll want to pay attention to this. They pull information from your sign-up form and they associate it with each email. For example, when I sign up for a MailChimp campaign, I might see Email Address, First Name, and Last Name. Naturally, I’d enter brandon@pangeagamescompany.com, Brandon, and Rollins respectively. That info is all stored in a database.

Each bit of information is associated with a merge tag.

*|EMAIL|* is brandon@pangeagamescompany.com

*|FNAME|* is Brandon

*|LNAME|* is Rollins

Someone can then write a newsletter that starts out as “Hey *|FNAME|*!” and it will show up as “Hey Brandon!” For my friend Carla, it’d be “Hey Carla!” and for my friend Sean, it’d be “Hey Sean!” This lets you personalize your emails with anything your users provide. You can add more merge tags if you want to customize your emails even more. There is a ton of potential here.

We’re going to stick to the basics today, though, so let’s talk about…

Creating a Landing Page that Works

MailChimp lets you create your own landing pages. You can create forms hosted by MailChimp and you can also get HTML code which you can put on your own website. I’ve used both, but I’ll stick to MailChimp’s basic forms since teaching you how to use custom ones requires you to know HTML. You can learn HTML on W3Schools for free – I used it in my teens and it’s still alive and well.

Click Signup forms. Click Select next to General forms. You can customize a whole bunch of forms, but we’re just going to talk about the Signup form itself since that’s the one you want to get absolutely right. This form will double as your landing page unless you decide to make a custom one and use Mailchimp’s HTML code on your own website.

What MailChimp gives you by default isn’t bad, but it’s not pretty either. You can spruce up this form very nicely with a little effort. First things first, though, think about the data you want to gather on your landing page. You need an email address for sure. I recommend gathering at least first name for your merge tags as well. Everything else is extra, so you have to strike this subtle balance. If you ask for too much information, people will drop off your page and not sign up. If you don’t ask for any extra information, it can be hard to segment your mailing list into groups of people with different interests. Regardless of what you decide to do, click on any fields you need to delete, rename, or relabel – you’ll have options on the right. Click on Add a field and then a button below to add a field asking for more information.

Once you’ve added and removed fields to your taste, click Design it. You can change the colors, fonts, and spacing of every part of your landing page – the page, the body, and the form itself. Click around in there and experiment to your taste. When you’re done, copy the Signup form URL that’s near the top in the screenshot above. That’s your landing page’s address. Share that address anywhere you need to such as your social media or your website.

Here is what my landing page looks like in MailChimp’s editor.

Creating a Template that Works

Click Templates then Create a template. I personally recommend that you pick one of Mailchimp’s featured templates and modify it to your tastes. On the right side, click on the Design button – you’ll see items including Page, Header, Body, Footer, Mobile Styles, and Monkey Rewards. You’ll be given lots of options on how to customize the page, such as colors, font sizes, line spacing, and more. I personally recommend staying pretty close to the original design, but swap out the colors for sure. Once you’re happy with the basic colors, fonts, and spacing of your template, click on the Content button to see all the things you can put into your mailer. What you see in the screenshot below can be dragged and dropped right onto your template.

Drag all the elements you like into your template. If you don’t want something in your template, hover over the item and then click on the trash can symbol on the top right. Once you get all your content items in the right locations, click on each one on the left. Then edit the details on the right. Details can be editing an image, updating text, changing where a button goes, and so on. Make sure to click Save & Close any time you make a change on the right side! When think you’ve got a good template, Preview and Test in the top right corner and then Enter preview mode.

This is an example of my newsletter, with the calls to action highlighted in yellow.

Now the whole time you’re doing this, you need to be looking at newsletters that you like and imitating their style. Pay particularly close attention to their “calls to action” – any articles they want you to read or buttons they want you to click. When you’re sending out your own mailer, you want to have one very clear call to action somewhere on the mailer. If you don’t, it’s pointless to send out in the first place. I personally put three calls to action in each blog email – one text link to an article and two image/text links to an article at the bottom – I’ve highlighted mine in red.

When you’re done with your template, click Save and Exit and give it a name you’ll remember. When you’re sending out email campaigns, you’ll be using your template. You can then swap out text and images and keep a consistent look and feel between all your emails. Go ahead and sign up for your email list and send out a sample campaign to yourself while you’re the only one on it. Make sure everything looks okay and go back and edit your template if it doesn’t.

Building Your Mailing List

Building your mailing list is a great first step, but it can be utterly defeating to put all this work into making a pretty mailer and pretty landing page only to send it to ten people. That’s why you need to think about ways to generate leads for your mailing list. There are a handful of ways to do this.

Create a lead magnet. That’s basically a fancy marketing term for a good reason for a person to give you their email. You could offer a print-and-play version of your game in exchange for an email. You could create something useful such as a how-to guide. You could offer people entry into a contest for a free game. I personally use my Discord server of over 1,000 game developers as a lead magnet because I put the invite link on the confirmation page.

No matter how you plan on reaching out to people, creating a lead magnet is essential. Why would anybody give you their personal information without a compelling reason? A lot of people don’t ask this question and therefore get hung up on the fact that people don’t want to give up their email addresses. You have to give them a good reason before you do anything else.

Link your landing page to your website and social media. Most of the time, my pinned tweets and Facebook posts go to my mailing lists. The same applies to the home pages of most of my websites, which usually contain a catchy line such as “Learn to make board games from scratch. Join my community of over 1,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.” Then right below that, I put a big, bright button that goes to my landing page.

Direct messages. Everything I’ve said above is great for passive outreach, but let’s assume you want to play hardball. If you have a social media following on Twitter or Instagram, you can send out personalized direct messages to each of your followers. Say something like “Hi (Name), I saw that you’re interested in (thing that’s relevant to your business). I’m offering (lead magnet). Is this something you’d be interested in?” If they say yes, send them the link and tell them what they need to do next, such as sign up and gain access to the lead magnet on the confirmation page.

Help content creators. I’ve talked about Why and How to Get Featured on Board Game Blogs and Podcasts. One of the best reasons to do that is because you can ask them to link to your landing page. You can often see this in the first or last paragraph of guest posts on your favorite blogs or in the show notes of podcasts you like. This is really solid way of growing your audience for free.

Do giveaway contests. Feeling a little more spendy? The absolute best way I’ve found of generating email lists is by offering something for free on Facebook in exchange for an email sign up. Just create a post like this, take out $20 in targeted ads, and watch the emails roll in.

Advertise. Last but not least, one of the best ways to passively bring in email leads with nearly no effort is to take out a Facebook ad. Target your audience very specifically by age, location, and especially interest. Keep an eye on it and make sure you’re not paying more than a dollar per email sign-up. You can read more about Facebook advertising in my previous post, How to Build up a Facebook Page as a Board Game Dev.

Mailing lists are pretty amazing for businesses. I hope this guide gives you what you need to get started. Come up with something to say, make a pretty landing page, make a professional email template, and bring in sign-ups using the methods I’ve described above. Monitor your metrics and experiment until you find something that works.

As always, feel free to ask questions below

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-build-a-mailing-list-and-send-newsletters-as-a-board-game-dev/feed/0How to Build up a Facebook Page as a Board Game Devhttp://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-build-up-a-facebook-page-as-a-board-game-dev/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-build-up-a-facebook-page-as-a-board-game-dev/#commentsMon, 23 Apr 2018 13:00:36 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2212Of all the social media sites in all the land, Facebook is the king. Last quarter, it had an average of 2.2 billion monthly active users. That is such a phenomenally high number that there is no comparison I can make that will drive it home. Facebook has connected the world in an unprecedented way, opening up a wealth of previously unimaginable opportunities to business owners.

It’s funny that I’ve just effusively praised Facebook. I’ve only started really paying attention to it in the last year, particularly when I started working on Highways & Byways. In this past year, I’ve been using Facebook’s advertising system to increase the visibility of blog posts and to drive people to the Highways & Byways Kickstarter mailer. A few hundred dollars in advertising money have gone a really long way toward increasing the visibility of my projects. We’ll get to that in more detail below

Much like my old staple How to Get Big on Twitter as a Board Game Dev, I’ll be covering everything you need to know to get started on Facebook as a board game developer. There is quite a bit that goes into it, so I’ve broken this guide into five parts:

What is Facebook Good For?

Getting Started

Getting Noticed

Refining Your Approach

Using Facebook for More than Just Posting

What is Facebook Good For?

Reasons to Use Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social media site in the world. In fact, at the moment I’m writing this article, it’s the third most popular website in the world, bested only by Google and YouTube. You can find the majority of people in North America on Facebook, making it the world’s de facto online water cooler. Basically, it’s the world’s biggest hangout spot.

Because Facebook has such a variety of people, this has opened up some incredible opportunities, which Facebook leadership has wisely taken advantage of. People on Facebook share lots of information about themselves – their age, location, interests, and so on. This is incredibly valuable information for marketers. That makes Facebook the best way I know of to target very, very, very specific niche audiences.

That leads neatly into Facebook’s main attraction for marketers: it has the best advertising system ever made. I know that’s a huge statement, but hear me out. Facebook reaches more people than any other entity in this world aside from Google. (Remember, YouTube – the #2 ranking site – is a part of Google.) People willingly share extraordinary and unprecedented amounts of information about themselves on Facebook voluntarily. For better or worse, it is a common behavior to compile a complete dossier of yourself online which is then accessible to marketers, which includes you as a burgeoning game developer.

Facebook is worth paying for. From what I’ve seen, it gets a strong return on investment that Twitter and Snapchat can’t touch. It’s faster and more efficient than other methods I use such as Twitter direct message campaigns. The only problem is that making board games is already expensive, and the idea of paying a super-rich company to show your game to people is pretty odious.

New game devs: don’t write off Facebook because it’s expensive. Having a basic Facebook presence is really valuable on its own. On top of that, you can run ad campaigns for just a few dollars at a time. It doesn’t have to be inaccessible.

Insider look at the Facebook headquarters.

Getting Started

Setting Up Your Account & Making it Look Good

First things first, you will need a personal Facebook page in order to launch one for your board game or business persona. If you’ve got that, go to your Facebook home page, click the arrow in the top right, and click Create a Page. Click the Page type that best describes the Facebook page you’re creating, choose a category, and enter a page name.

Upload a profile photo, which will display as a circular 170×170 photo. Then upload a cover photo that is 851×315. When you’re done with that, it will take you to your fresh Facebook page. Click Settings. Go through every single item and update all the settings as you like, with special attention paid to: Edit Page > Tabs and Payment. The former will control the layout of your Facebook page. The latter will determine how you pay for advertisements.

Once you’re done with all that, go back to your Facebook page and follow all the “Page Tips” in the top center of your Facebook feed. Facebook is really good about walking you through all the steps you need to take to get set up.

Making Early Content

Once your page layout and settings are set up the way you like them, I recommend backdating two weeks of posts. Be sure to consider your Content Mix when you are backdating posts and scheduling future ones. As a review, here is a quote about Content Mix from How to Get Big on Twitter as a Board Game Dev. Swap out “tweets” for “posts” and the same principle still applies.

The first is what I call Content Mix. This is comprised of three different forms of communication: sharing, talking, and self-promotion. Sharing involves retweeting others’ tweets when they speak to you, or alternatively, finding cool stuff online that’s worth bringing up in conversation. Talking is simply hanging out and passing time. Self-promotion is self-explanatory. However, relentless self-promotion will make you look dumb. Failure to self-promote at all will give you very few benefits because no one will know what you do. You have strike a balance.

I suggest taking a 5/3/2 approach. For every 10 tweets, 5 should be sharing others’ work, 3 should be conversational, and 2 should be self-promoting. Naturally, you’ll want to tweak this to what your audience responds to. As for what specifically to say and share, watch what other successful tweeters do. Copy the things they do that you like, but make sure you do so in your own words. As time passes, you will find your own voice.

Getting Noticed

Getting Page Likes Using Existing Resources

Getting noticed on Facebook works differently than getting noticed Twitter or Instagram. On both of those social media sites, you have a good system for organic reach. That means you can reach out to people and make connections without spending money on ads. Facebook, on the other hand, has almost entirely eliminated organic reach.

That said, getting your first few page likes doesn’t have to be too tricky. The best thing you can do to get your first few page likes is to reach out to current Facebook friends. If you have a lot of Facebook friends on your personal Facebook account and you send out invites to most or all of them, you’ll pick up a handful of page likes that way. You can also use Twitter or Instagram to ask people to like your page, if you’ve got those set up already. Last but not least, if you’ve spent time building up a mailing list, you can always ask people to like your Facebook page in your next mailer.

Smart Advertising

The best way to build up your Facebook page quickly, though, is through smart use of their advertising system. You can boost posts and perform some advertising functions from your Facebook page itself, but the best way to access their ad system is to click the top right arrow on your personal Facebook home page. Then click Manage Ads. Here is what my Ads Manger looks like.

When you get to a screen like what you see above, click the Campaigns tab and then the Create button. You’ll be given a bunch of options for “What’s your marketing objective?” – the main ones being Traffic and Engagement. Traffic is ideal for getting people to click on links, such as blog posts or landing pages. Engagement is ideal for getting page likes or post comments/likes.

Of the two options, Traffic is better since you can actually use that to drive people to your landing pages. However, if you’re trying to build your Facebook page up quickly, you might like using Engagement to build up a few dozen or a few hundred page likes. This can get expensive quickly, and to be honest, I’m not convinced there is an ROI there.

Using a Traffic campaign as an example, here is what it’s like to set up an ad…

Choose where you want to drive your Traffic: I would recommend using your website.

Create an audience: This is the most important part. You can choose your audience by location, age, and other demographics, interests, and behaviors. You want to choose this very carefully and picked the narrowest audience you can so your ads are very well targeted.

For this website, to promote posts, I use locations of the US, UK, and Australia – all wealthy countries which speak English. I use ages 25-45 and market to men and women. Most importantly, though I make sure people like at least ONE of the following: BoardGameGeek, Geek & Sundry, Tabletop games, Tabletop Gaming News, or board games ALONG WITH Game Development or Game Design. That narrows down my audience to about 120,000 people and makes sure every dollar I spend is well-spent.

Choose your placements: You can choose where your ads will show up. That means different places on Facebook, such as the Feed, Instant Articles, In-Stream Videos, Right Column, Suggested Videos, and Marketplace. On Instagram, that means Feed and Stories. There are also options for Audience Network and Messenger, too, but I’ve never used those. When in doubt: use Facebook Feeds only – I’ve had good results with that.

Choose your budget and schedule: Start with one day and $5-10 until you know what you’re doing. You can always extend the end date and add to the budget later.

Pitfalls

By far the biggest thing you can do wrong on Facebook is to throw money away on bad advertising campaigns. You need to continuously monitor every Facebook campaign you run. If your ads don’t perform well, cut off the budget and try something else. Don’t pay more than $0.50 per page click or page like. If you have to pay more than that (at least within the board game industry), either your ad is unappealing or you haven’t defined your audience well enough.

Facebook will also constantly push you to boost posts for visibility. Don’t boost posts unless you have a very good reason. Good reasons to boost posts include links to your website, asking people to sign up for your mailing list, or giveaway contests. Otherwise, steer clear – it’s not the best use of your money.

You Must Experiment

Facebook rewards experimentation. I recommend that beginners play with the advertising system with $5 or $10 at a time until they get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. The ideal advertisement tomorrow will not be the same as the ideal advertisement today. Facebook isn’t interested in you using their ad system to its fullest potential. To them, a dollar is a dollar. The responsibility to learn falls squarely on your shoulders.

Refining Your Approach

Automating Your Posts: Ongoing

You can’t automate relationship building. You can’t automate making genuine, heartfelt connections with others. You can, however, automate the posts which you broadcast to the whole world. I strongly suggest you use either Buffer or Facebook scheduler to prepare posts in advance.Every couple of weeks, you can come up with a bunch of posts, and pick the optimal time to post them. You don’t have to be tied to your phone.

You should still check Facebook on a regular basis. It’s still a good idea to converse with others. Automation will allow you to have some constant presence at all times, even when you’re at work, with your kids, or on vacation.

Refining Your Account: Ongoing

Automating posts will also free up time for you to start refining your posts. After a month or two of posting, you’ll be able to make good use of Facebook Insights – a robust data-gathering system that comes automatically with your Facebook page. Figure out what people retweet and like and post more of it. As you refine your approach, you’ll get followers more automatically and less manually.

Using Facebook for More than Just Posting

Groups

One very popular part of Facebook are Facebook groups. People join these groups and talk about their common interests. There are lots of groups for board games on Facebook and a lot of them can help you promote your business, if you’re careful and respectful. Groups have great engagement and they all have a unique culture.

You should be careful before you start your own, though. They can be tremendous for your business, but it’s tough to get one started on your own. On top of that, recent changes to Facebook’s notification algorithm may reduce the value of Facebook groups in the near future. Long story short, people will likely see fewer notifications from groups. Between us, I think this is a good thing because groups spam my personal Facebook notifications pretty hard.

Market Research

Facebook is also a really good way to keep on top of market trends. Though I rarely speak in them, I’m a fly on the wall in at least ten different Facebook groups. I pay attention to what people are saying in the groups. In addition to that, I’ve been known to do $5 and $10 ad experiments just to see what people are interested in.

Testing Ideas with the Ad System

Speaking of advertising research, if you’re looking to test the market for a new game and you haven’t committed to a theme or mechanics, here is an experiment you can run. Make advertisements for a few different game ideas you have. Set up landing pages for each one. Take out Facebook ads for each game idea directing to their corresponding landing pages. Put the same amount of money on each ad. See which one gets the most clicks. The idea that performs the best is one you should consider designing.

Making Connections

As with any social media site, it’s not just about pushing your business and selling things. You’ll also be meeting people and making friends. That can open tons of doors for you, so don’t just bury your head in advertisements and analytics. Meet some people!

Though intimidating and sometimes expensive, Facebook is an extremely valuable tool for a board game developer to use. If you take the time to work it into your marketing approach and commit to experimentation and improvement, you will definitely benefit from being on Facebook over time.

I know this is a lot of material to cover, so if you have any questions about setting up or managing a Facebook page, please ask below

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-build-up-a-facebook-page-as-a-board-game-dev/feed/1The Last Dev Diary & What Comes Nexthttp://brandonthegamedev.com/the-last-dev-diary-what-comes-next/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/the-last-dev-diary-what-comes-next/#respondFri, 20 Apr 2018 13:00:39 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2357Today marks the conclusion of Dev Diary: Lessons Learned through the Making of Highways & Byways. This is the last Dev Diary. Start to Finish: Publish and Sell Your First Board Game is still going to continue. I’ll be doing a post every Monday instead of every Monday and Friday.

Considering the insights I have gained with the unsuccessful conclusion of Highways & Byways, I will be creating a brief series on Failure Recovery which will be worked into Start to Finish. This is a really important part of getting started in the board game industry which I had not considered writing about until now. Failed product launches happen from time to time, especially with newcomers. Keep an eye out for the Failure Recovery series around the middle of May 2018.

You may be asking: why stop the Dev Diary now? There are two really compelling reasons:

The Dev Diary series was created to detail to development process of Highways & Byways from start to finish. With Highways & Byways having concluded, so too must the series.

This will also help me since I’ll regain a few hours each week for game development.

Some of you may be wondering what the conclusion of the Dev Diary and the failure of the Highways & Byways campaign means for me personally. What comes next?

First and foremost: I’m still going to make games and write about making games. I’ll be taking the lessons I’ve learned from Highways & Byways and making games more carefully next time. The big two lessons for me are “start by validating the market” and “don’t work alone.” That means I’m doing a lot of polling and question-asking to see what people are into. I’ve also started working with some people who I’ve grown close to over the last couple of years on new games.

In addition, there is a whole lot of clean up I need to do in order to make sure Pangea Games runs smoothly in the future. For one, I have cut back on unnecessary social media accounts, including the War Co. and Highways & Byways accounts. I’ve streamlined my social media to where only the blog and Pangea Games have social media accounts. On top of that, there are a number of small inefficiencies that I’m resolving.

Most importantly, since I’m no longer working alone, I’m going to start making formal budgets and plans. I’ve always relied on written documentation, even while working alone. However, when working with others, it’s extremely critical to capture timelines and to-do lists in a formal way.

Here we stand on the precipice of a brave new world. There is an enormous amount of opportunity ahead for Pangea Games and my future projects. Bringing the Dev Diary series to its conclusion is just one part of that. Thank you for reading this series and enjoy the continuation of Start to Finish

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/the-last-dev-diary-what-comes-next/feed/0How to Get Big on Twitter as a Board Game Dev – Revisited in 2018http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-get-big-on-twitter-as-a-board-game-dev-revisited-in-2018/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-get-big-on-twitter-as-a-board-game-dev-revisited-in-2018/#respondMon, 16 Apr 2018 13:00:19 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2088About a year ago, I wrote How to Get Big on Twitter as a Board Game Dev. It is one of the best articles I’ve done on this site. It fits in beautifully with the Marketing & Promoting Your Game series of Start to Finish: Publish and Sell Your First Board Game.

It’s funny – I actually planned to write a whole new post from scratch with up-to-date information. I was going to use that old post as an outline and nothing more. Yet I stand by nearly everything I said in that and I don’t see much need to edit it. What I’ll do instead is post the link in really big text below. Then below the picture, I’ll post new things I’ve learned about Twitter in the last year.

Marketing is a slow dance. You have to very slowly build your reputation. Twitter is great because it lets new developers draw attention to themselves with fewer barriers than ever before. But it’s still a long, slow climb from Attention to Action. You have to have a great game, a great website, a good business case, and so on. You can’t tweet yourself to the Top 100 on Board Game Geek. Trust me, I tried.

Lessons Learned Since the Original Article

Read up on that old article? Great! Because I have a few responses to my old work that will be relevant you as a board game dev hoping to get big on Twitter today. Twitter is a dynamic, fluctuating environment that rewards experimentation. Here are some lessons I’ve learned since I posted the original article in May 2017.

Stricter Spam Rules

Twitter has clamped down a lot more on spammy behavior since I got started in 2015. I think it might have something to do with all the bot traffic that the site’s suffered from over the last couple of years. Regardless of the cause, the implications for board game devs are pretty clear: you can’t get away with following hundreds of people every day.

There was a definite time when you could follow 400 or 500 people every day and get away with it. Your followers would often be untargeted and loaded with spam, but there was an argument to be made that it was still worth it because you could get a lot of quality followers because you were getting more followers in general. It’s true – going to @BoardGameGeek and following 400-500 people per day would get you a lot of board game fans.

Twitter won’t let you do that anymore. The threshold for spam-like behavior has been dramatically dropped, and they’ll suspend your account a lot more easily. If you’re doing something shady but not quite spammy, they’ll redirect you the Terms of Service page.

Thank goodness. Twitter has needed to clamp down on the bad behavior for a while and they’re actually taking clear steps now. Good for them! Just understand that if you had any intention of using dirty tactics to grow your following, they probably won’t work anymore and they’ll probably get you banned.

Lead Generation

I used to argue against following people you don’t know to grow your audience, instead of saying you should like/comment/retweet instead. I still think that’s the best form of engagement, but if you’re looking for something faster, I’ve found a method that works. It’s a method of lead generation that uses Twitter.

Go to a website such as ScoutZen, enter in an account with a similar audience to yours (for example, I’ve used @CardboardEdison), and export their followers (1,000 for free on the site I’m using). Then follow 30-50 people every day on that list, skipping over spam accounts and untargeted accounts. Like and comment on their tweets when it makes sense to.

The basic idea here is that you start with a list of people who are likely to like your tweets. Then you initiate contact in the easiest, quickest way possible – following. Like and comment on their tweets so you’re actually engaging with them, if only a little bit. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s not bombarding completely random people with unwanted messages, and – most importantly – it works like a charm. Seriously, I’ve gotten a 20% follow-back rate when doing this.

It’s not perfect, though. It’s extremely manual. At some point, you’ll have to unfollow people who don’t follow you back. Yet for people who want to grow their Twitter quickly, this is the method I recommend. Start with 10-20/day and work your way up to 50. You can do more if you’re brave.

Direct Messaging Campaigns

Automatic direct messages – auto DMs – are just about the most annoying thing on Twitter. Yet a hand-crafted direct message from a cool person doing things you like? That’s worth reading!

One quick way to get a lot of people to take action very quickly is to start a Twitter DM campaign. Let’s assume you’re using friendly lead generation methods and your audience is well-targeted. I’ve used Twitter DM campaigns on both Brandon the Game Dev and Highways & Byways. Here are the boilerplate messages I’ve used – I change their text up a little because I read people’s bios.

Hey (Name)! I noticed you’re a board game dev, so I’d like to invite you to my board game dev Discord community. It’s a hang-out spot for about 1,100 game devs and gamers. Is this something you’d be interested in?

Hey (Name)! I noticed you’re a board gamer and that you’re interested in Highways & Byways. Would you like to receive an email notification when the Kickstarter goes up March 26?

If people respond – and they do about 15% of the time – I send them a link to my landing page with clear instructions. My overall conversion rate on DM campaigns is around 10%, which I consider to be really good. I basically built my 1,100 person game dev Discord server with Twitter DMs.

These are all my additions to my old work. If you have any questions or further observations, let me know in the comments below

Highways & Byways failed, but all is not lost.

I’ve started working on a new game called Yesterday’s War.

After a year of documenting the Highways & Byways development process through the Dev Diary, this is not the post I wanted to write. I would have much preferred to write a post about how Highways & Byways funded on day 1. Yet today I must write a post on why I canceled the Highways & Byways campaign after two weeks at less than one-third funded.

When I created this blog, I created it to help see creators through the entire game development process. That means the highs and the lows. I will not sweep failure under the rug. That wouldn’t do you any good. It wouldn’t do me any good. Let’s dissect this Kickstarter campaign failure in detail so we can all walk away smarter.

Let’s get something straight first: I make no excuses. I failed. There are reasons for that. It was preventable. I will do better next time.

Why Highways & Byways Failed on Kickstarter

The Highways & Byways Kickstarter campaign failure is the result of poor product-market fit. That basically means that Highways & Byways, intrinsically as a game itself, does not match up well with the desires of the greater Kickstarter board gaming community. I’ve done a lot of hemming and hawing over this, asking “is this really the reason? What other factors could be at play?” There are some smaller factors that contributed to the Kickstarter failure, but this is the big one and I will present my arguments for that a few paragraphs from now. Long story short is that I made Highways & Byways without once asking “what do people want?” I simply pursued a passion project.

A successful Kickstarter campaign, or broadly speaking, a successful product launch hinges upon two big things: product-market fit and audience. If you have a beautiful, perfect product that’s hand-made for a very specific audience, but you have nobody’s attention – you will fail. It’s one of those “tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it” situations. Likewise, if you have a healthy audience, such as the one I’ve grown online, but a product that nobody asked for, you’ll have a few buyers, but ultimately people will ignore you and move on with their day. People are too busy to care about things that only “sort of” interest them.

Imagine the relationship between product-market fit and audience size as a seesaw. The product-market fit is the base of the seesaw and the audience size is the length of the seesaw. If you have a good product-market fit and a small audience, you can put a rock on one end, drop a bowling ball on the other, and the rock will fly (but not very far). It might go high enough to launch. This is how War Co.worked for me. The game ignited strong passion in people, but my marketing techniques were sloppy and disorganized.

On the flip side, if you have a poor product-market fit and a sizable audience, as I did with Highways & Byways, you get the seesaw on the right. Put a rock on one end, drop a bowling ball on the other, and the rock won’t go very far either. I had an efficient marketing system with a big mailing list, a lot of Twitter followers, and even a little love on the Board Game Geek page. Yet the game itself was only appealing to a very specific group of people, most of whom didn’t hang out on Kickstarter.

Perhaps in 2012, Highways & Byways could have worked. I think it could have even worked in 2016 when I started seriously making board games. Yet at this current moment, Kickstarter has become a buffet. If you put food on the buffet line, it has to be one of the most attractive things out there or else it won’t get eaten. Then you have to take all your soup back home from the work potluck…not that this happened to me.

I’m being a bit silly here, but stop and think about what’s gotten big on Kickstarter lately. It’s a lot of light games near or under $20 USD in price. It’s a lot of heavy games with miniatures. There isn’t very much in between. Highways & Byways falls very much in between, targeted family gamers (who use Kickstarter less) for $49 USD (which isn’t a great price point right now) with no standout components. I never once took Kickstarter data before making this game and its stagnation on Kickstarter shows.

Why I Believe Product-Market Fit is the Root Problem

The reason I believe product-market fit is the root problem is mostly because of the process of elimination. I looked at the elements that led up to the Kickstarter based on my own personal “game development process map” from creation to Kickstarter. I’m going to go through them in reverse chronological order so you can see how I arrived at this grim diagnosis.

Was it the Kickstarter campaign itself? I don’t think so. The campaign itself has a conversion rate of 3%, an average pledge rate that matches with the core reward, lots of comments relative to the funds raised, and a staggering 51% completion rate on the video. I’ve received nothing but compliments on the way the page was laid out. I initiated the launch sequence with no problems.

Was it the audience size? I doubt it. I had, at the start of this campaign, over 500 emails for Highways & Byways alone, 137 for War Co., and – get this – nearly 1,200 for this blog. On top of that, I have tons of Twitter and Instagram followers across multiple accounts. Even after giving Facebook relatively little attention, the blog and Byways Facebook pages have over or nearly 400 likes each – most of whom are unique individuals.

Was it lack of outreach in terms of streams, blogs, podcasts, etc.? You can always do more outreach, but I wound up working with the super cool people behind Board Game Design Laband We’re Not Wizards. They have fairly large audiences and are only two of dozens of people I’ve worked within the last three months. I don’t think this was the problem.

Was it a result of bad reviews or poor gameplay? No, they were about as positive as War Co. In fact, they were arguably better. Those who played Highways & Byways showed real desire and passion to play it again. I wouldn’t have gone further if they didn’t.

Was it the artwork? I doubt it. I have received lots of praise for it from reviewers and gamers alike. Ads containing the artwork performed well on Facebook. I would have sent them back to James Masino to be reworked if they did.

Was it the basic concept? Yes. I never asked anybody what they wanted to see. I never used market data to validate this game. I’ve never found an adequate game to make a comparison to. I’ve not seen another campaign like it succeed. I just wasn’t there mentally when I started this game. It was another passion project, much like War Co. I handled the operations much better this time, but the core concept didn’t work.

What Led to Poor Product-Market Fit?

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating. Highways & Byways was a passion project. War Co. was, too, but it was also a sci-fi game with tons of lore and crunchy calculations. Kickstarter really likes sci-fi, lore-heavy games, and crunchy calculations. That was my saving grace despite a marketing plan that was dodgy at best. Highways & Byways is a better game than War Co., but it’s not a better product. It was purely based on my interests, which the board gaming community as a whole does not happen to share.

You can follow your passions and make money. But you can’t blindlyfollow your passions and make money.

Decide right now whether you’re in it for creativity, money, or both. If you’re in it for creativity, don’t worry about the larger trends. If you’re in it for money, become a sellout, make a fantasy worker placement / area control game for $19. If you’re in it for both, figure out where your interests and the market’s interests line up. That’s where you want to be. That’s where I’m moving.

My sellout comment above is a joke, but it hints at some truth. Kickstarter is a big, beautiful data set. You can rip 100 board game campaigns off there and get a pretty good idea at which price points, mechanics, themes, and art styles make money. Use that data! I didn’t use that data because I was pursuing a passion project.

With all this spelled out, there is one more major problem: I worked alone. If I didn’t work alone, there is a very good chance someone would have stopped me. Even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t have taken as long as it did. I may have even had some games in the backlog for after Highways & Byways, which would have also softened the fall.

All of this – poor product-market fit caused by the blind pursuit of passion, a lack of data, and refusal to delegate – is what I believe broke Byways. I think this is far more important than posting on the perfect, magical Facebook groups, getting upvotes on Reddit, or having WIP thread on Board Game Geek. Those things are valuable and I will look into them more in the future, but they’re not the roots.

What am I Going to Do?

By the evening of Day 1, Highways & Byways was funding slower than War Co. It had a higher funding goal and better marketing operations. I knew something was off immediately, so in my spare moments, I started devising a plan B. Thankfully, I have a beautiful place to crash land. I have an incredibly polite and intelligent Discord server of over 1,100 game developers. I have a blog that, ironically, is more popular right now than it was when I started the campaign. I have an online platform. I make plenty of money. I’ve got a lot of friends and family. The world is not in ruins.

I’ve assembled a group of close associates. We are going to start coordinating our efforts, dividing up tasks, and being really open and honest with each other. Being alone was a major factor in my failure, and this is going to help.

Next thing I’m going to do is cut back all the crap. I’m going to stop running so many social media accounts. I’m going to eliminate processes that aren’t effective. Moreover, I’m going to stop doing what I’m not great at. I’m good at a lot of the game development process, but it’s time to delegate some things – such as game design and play-testing – to others who have more intrinsic talent than I do. I’m still going to make games, I’m just going to make sure my contributions really count next time.

This last one is huge. I am never going to create a product without validating the market first. Never, never, never, never, never, never, never again. I’m going to find out what people like, compare that to what I like, and make something that makes us all very happy. This is the first filter in my new game development process and I will use it aggressively.

As for Highways & Byways itself: I may do a small print run. I’m still investigating that.

Writing this post was like performing an exorcism. I’d prefer to not have to have written it, but here we are. I’ve learned a ton. I’m not going to quit. I have a plan for the future and more optimism than I had even a few weeks ago in the run-up to this campaign.

I hope you can learn from my mistakes. Helping you is what this blog is all about

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/why-the-highways-byways-kickstarter-campaign-crashed-burned/feed/28How to Generate Traffic for Your Board Game Websitehttp://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-generate-traffic-for-your-board-game-website/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-generate-traffic-for-your-board-game-website/#respondMon, 09 Apr 2018 13:00:34 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2086Last week, I talked about why it’s so hard to get noticed online, covering some steps you can take to more effectively draw attention. Following the steps in that article will definitely help you get started, but there is a lot more to marketing than drawing attention. You need to make people interested in what you have to say and what you have to offer. The best proxy I know for measuring people’s interest online is what we’ll be talking about today: web traffic.

According to the Attention-Interest-Desire-Action model which I discussed in A Crash Course in Board Game Marketing & Promotion, I consider web traffic to be interest. In fact, when somebody visits your website, landing page, or Kickstarter campaign, that means something compelled them enough to click on a link or type in the address. Page views alone indicate interest because your leads – your potential customers – are actually engaging with something you’ve made. Even if your sales pitch falls flat and fails to stoke desire or encourage action, you’ve still got their interest.

Encouraging people to click on your website or Kickstarter campaign takes some effort, and I’ll get to specific recommendations farther down in this article. We have a little housekeeping to do first, though. Before we get started with specific tips on how to generate traffic, there are a few requirements you’ll need to meet.

Before Generating Web Traffic

Figure out your audience. Absolute perfection in the marketplace is impossible to find. You can only make products and services that are perfect for a particular group of people. Your resources are limited and you need to spend them reaching out to a highly targeted specific group of people who care about what you have to say. Before you push traffic to your website – or for that matter, build it – know who you’re working for.

Create a professional website. Before you even consider pushing your website online (or for that matter, your Kickstarter campaign or a landing page), it needs to look great. Giving you a crash course in web design / Kickstarter setup is outside of the scope of this article, but I do have some quick tips for you if you’ve never made a website before.

Install WordPress using one of their guides. (I use WordPress for this site – very user-friendly.)

Use a WordPress theme you like and tweak the configuration until you’re satisfied.

If all else fails, hire a professional or ask a tech-savvy friend for help.

For landing pages: I still recommend setting up a full site with the above tips.

For Kickstarter campaigns: refer to popular Kickstarter campaigns and mimic their layouts.

Come up with a marketing strategy. Before you make serious effort to generate web traffic, make sure everything else in your marketing strategy is in good shape. I talk about doing that in How to Choose & Use a Board Game Marketing Strategy that Works. Web traffic should not be your end goal – generating it is simply a mean to an end.

Learn how to break through the noise online. The best website in the world isn’t going to matter if you can’t get anyone to look at it. Review my article How to Rise Above the Noise of the Internet & Get Noticed to learn more about getting established online. These two articles don’t share much overlap in content past this point.

6 Ways to Generate Web Traffic

I’m told this is what web traffic looks like.

With all the above prerequisites in mind, this is where we can discuss six recommendations on building traffic for your website or Kickstarter campaign. I’ve used all the methods below myself and have found success with each, so I’m happy to share them

Reach out to influencers. This is absolutely the easiest and best way to get web traffic. It’s like drafting off another car to go faster for less effort. It’s not hard to get featured on blogs or podcasts or to get your game reviewed. Identify people who have large or loyal audiences and offer to help them out. Try to help them make content, whether that be through an interview, a review, a live-stream, or even just a well-written press release. This essentially lets you borrow the audiences of people who are already established, bypass the worst parts of the hype machine, and continue on with a permanently larger audience. All forms of influencer outreach can be good for websites, but I’d say reviews are particularly good for Kickstarter campaigns.

Optimize for search engines. By far, the most reliable and consistent traffic source for this blog is Google. A few months ago, I noticed my work was starting to pop up in Google. At the time I’m writing this – late February – it accounts for 30-40% of my traffic on any given week, which is a plurality. Whereas influencer outreach is inconsistent but very useful for me, search engine traffic is steady as a rock.

There are a number of things you can do to improve your website’s search engine ranking. These tasks are collectively known as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be ridiculously complex and it changes way too often for me to cover in its entirety on the blog. However, I have one really useful tip for you. If you’re using WordPress like I recommended earlier, you can install a plugin such as All in One SEO Pack that will handle the vast majority of your SEO.

From there, you’ll want to make sure you’re using compelling and clickable titles with good descriptions. If you’re doing a simple website, keep your page titles simple. If you’re doing a blog like me, experiment with different title types and see what works. For me, I’ve found the best results by starting posts with “How to” and using the words “board game” somewhere in the title. I also have good luck with titles that start with a number, such as 16 Mistakes I Made on My First Game & How You Can Avoid Them. We can get into a deep discussion of why some titles work and why some don’t, but the best thing you can do is simply experiment, observe, and use the data in front of you to make decisions.

To improve your search engine rank further, it helps to follow both the previous recommendation (influencers) and the following one (social media). Both have great abilities to generate links to your website from other places, which can improve your search engine ranking.

Long story short, social media is a great way to bring in traffic directly since people can click on links you post – and they will, if your posts are compelling enough. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and similar websites are much faster ways to reach out to people than through search engines or influencers – making them really useful for Kickstarter campaigns.

Social media also helps break the ice between you and influencers. Over time, social media links also start to add up and improve your website’s ranking in Google.

Build a mailing list. Mailing lists are staples of online marketing – and for good reason! They have a tendency to generate a lot of clicks for a little work. The mailer for this blog takes about 20 minutes per week to write and it brings in around 7-8% of my traffic. Much like search engines, mailing lists are steady as clock. I’ll cover mailing lists in more detail in a later post, but for now, go ahead and set up a free account on MailChimp. It’s really easy to use.

For Kickstarter campaigns especially, mailing lists are tremendously useful. You can create a landing page for people to go to long before you ever launch your Kickstarter campaign. You can collect email addresses over a period of months and then send out a single email to everybody at once.

Talk to people directly. It seems crude and time-consuming, but it works like a charm and it will build your people skills. Social media provides a great venue to speak to people directly about your website or Kickstarter campaign. To be clear, though, I’m not talking about tweeting or Instagramming to the world at large – I’m talking about replies, comments, and direct messages. Building actual, real, concrete relationships with people goes a long way. When you’re starting with absolutely no traffic, either this or advertising is your best bet.

Advertise. I touched on this last week in How to Rise Above the Noise of the Internet & Get Noticed, but it bears repeating. A lot of grunt work can be eliminated by taking out some Facebook ads that link to your website. This works especially well if you pair your advertisements with a mailing list so you can get repeated traffic from it. I’ll conclude with something I suggested last week since it’s still highly relevant here.

One method I’ve found particularly useful is to set up a giveaway contest on Facebook. Give away some game or some gift that will attract people who would like your game. Take out anywhere from twenty to a few hundred dollars to boost the post. I’ve gotten emails for as cheap as $0.50 each, once you consider the price of the giveaway prize plus shipping.

Convincing people to visit your site can seem daunting at first, but there are a lot of methods you can use that will help you get started. Advertising, direct outreach, and influencer outreach are great ways to start. Mailing lists, social media, search engine optimization, and advertising again can continue to bring you traffic on a regular basis.

As always, experiment with a lot of methods, gather data, and see what works for you. And if you have any questions for me, ask below

]]>http://brandonthegamedev.com/how-to-generate-traffic-for-your-board-game-website/feed/0The Most Underrated Rule in Business: Have a Backup Planhttp://brandonthegamedev.com/the-most-underrated-rule-in-business-having-a-backup-plan/
http://brandonthegamedev.com/the-most-underrated-rule-in-business-having-a-backup-plan/#respondFri, 06 Apr 2018 13:00:54 +0000http://brandonthegamedev.com/?p=2334Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

In 1519, Hernán Cortés and his 600 man crew washed up on the shores of Mexico. He had colonization on his mind, and he wanted to take over the Yucatan Peninsula. He was outgunned and outmanned, so he did the sensible thing: he ordered his troops to burn the boats.

This story may or may not be true, but the myth persists. It’s often used as an allegory in business seminars about the importance of commitment to your strategy. After all, if you have no ability to turn back, your only two options are to fight for victory or die. The people who run these seminars say Cortés is a leadership genius.

That’s stupid.

Commitment and persistence are absolutely critical elements to succeeding in anything, especially trying to create a business. I could bring up dozens of stories of famous people who failed over and over again until they were finally successful. This is beyond cliche, though.

The most underrated rule in business is “have a backup plan in mind.” If you do something risky, there is a chance of failure. Don’t set your sights on one particular outcome, set your sights on a particular direction you want to go in. It’s so important to be flexible in the face of failure.

Pursuing your creative passions, building a business, or even generally just trying to be your best self requires a series of course corrections. If you have no backup plan in mind when you do something risky, you make it that much harder to get up when you fall. And you will fall. If you’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, you will fall at some point.

What brings this up? Running a Kickstarter campaign has put me in touch with a lot of others doing the same thing. I’ve met people who have quit their jobs to run campaigns. I’ve met people who have their heart set on one particular game. I’ve met people who have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into games instead of putting money into their retirement accounts.

For those of you who read my blog looking for a place to get started, I have some advice for you. This will help you to have a backup plan in case things don’t go how you want them to:

Let me tell you some things about my personal situation that might help you understand how I’m approaching the board game industry.

I work a full-time job. I will not quit that until board games make more cash than that job. That’s going to take some serious cash, because I work in IT and I have an MBA. I require the ability to pay bills, save aggressively for retirement, and keep a healthcare plan. This is just straight-up reality of living.

I don’t write this blog to promise you a million dollars or whatever. That’s just nonsense. I write this blog to capture the moment. I feel like a lot of people just need someone two years ahead of them in what they’re trying to do. That’s what I’m trying to with the board game industry. That’s why most of my tutorials are for really specific subjects too.

I have multiple designs in mind if Highways & Byways bombs on Kickstarter. On top of that, I’ve got a pretty extensive network behind the scenes through my Discord server. I can collaborate with others far, far more easily than I could at the start of the Highways & Byways development process.

The amount of money I spend on my retirement account outpaces the amount of money I spend on board games by a factor of 3 to 1. This will not change until Pangea Games starts making returns that exceed the returns I get from a Vanguard index fund.

Don’t fall for the cutesy crap online that tells you all you need is passion and commitment. You need to be smart about your approach to your projects, too. You need to have a Plan B.

I believe whole-heartedly that you can make a living making board games. I believe whole-heartedly that you can do creative things, have fun, and make a life out of it. I believe it’s a repeatable process, too. I believe you don’t have to be some incredibly rare sort of person. I believe that most people who try for long enough can make it work. It just takes a lot of time, a lot of dedication, and the ability to change as needed.